Premise:  Congress has passed laws on carbon sequestration and taxes such that it is worth hundreds of dollars a ton to sequester carbon to avoid the taxes, but capturing it costs about 70% as much as the tax and Wall Street is wailing.  

A Carbon Sunrise?

        In response to global warming, industry will have to capture all carbon waste.  But, it will be a great boon to our economy according to several new patents provisionally filed under the group name Sequestered Carbon Amendment and Fertilization, SCAF. 

        Carbon and carbon dioxide will be used to enhance agriculture, save up to 96% of all water used in agriculture, reclaim lands long thought too poor and dry for farming bringing huge areas into cultivation.  These patents are the product of new thinking on and work in plant physiology.

        With remarkably simple processes inventor Adrian Vance avoids the expense of pumping carbon dioxide down deep wells, abandoned mines or burying it at sea, chemically compressing CO2 equivalent to 555 atmospheres or 8159 p.s.i. for use it in agriculture with high profits while fully recovering the agents.  

        Initial crop output gains will be 30% and with genetic engineering more than double from there ultimately saving up to 96% of the water now used in agriculture.  It will be as if we had discovered twice as many wells and reserviors as we have and all for free!  We only need to divert the water to urban areas, process it for human consumption and use it.         

Land Recovery

        Pure carbon captured by Cottrell Electrostatic Precipitators, a 100 year-old technology, is used to recover soils long thought not suitable for agriculture.  The legendary Terra Preta soils of Central America and the Amazon basin were a geological oddity until archeologists found pottery shards and hand-ground charcoal in these black soils.  They produced several times the crops of European soils and amazed agriculturalists in the first Cortez expedition.  Electrostatically captured elemental carbon used in this way is a huge improvement in the process because of its' much greater surface area and occurance of carbon allotropes in the product.

          Mr. Vance speculates Central American and Amazon Indians saw their old fire pits were islands of fertility in otherwise barren savannas.  They expanded and enlarged these pits to make fields of these soils by mixing ground charcoal with the clay and sand they found throughout their lands.

          Pure carbon is ideal for sequestration per the new laws as it does not decompose and it has recently been found that elemental carbon from Cottrell Precipitators is in the form of Fullerenes or “Bucky Balls” as well as tubular nets and other interesting forms.  Bucky Balls are 50 to 70 atom allotropes of carbon, that look like tiny geodesic domes, hence the name “Bucky Balls” after the F. Buckminster Fuller the designer-engineer who popularized the geodesic dome form in building.  They are much smaller than any hand-ground carbon and have much more surface area than anything ever produced by hand grinding.  And, they present nanotechnology opportunities in this application.

          It is hoped that nanoscience will be able to make use of these forms in taking poisonous metal ions out of soil circulation as Bucky Balls could make excellent containers for heavy metal ions.  They would be sealed in place with molecular bonds in a structure that has the surface hardness of a diamond.  Nothing is harder or tougher and if we can make heavy metal ion traps we will have found a simple, cheap way to clean up many poisoned land sites.

      Carbon Dioxide Fertilization

           Carbon dioxide is the most important nutrient for green plants.  Plants need seven ounces of it to make every pound of sugar, starch, cellulose or wood they make photosynthetically.  44% of every green plant is carbon and up to now the only source has been air in which there was but 0.028% until  man started burning fossil fuels.  Today CO2 is up 35%, but with only 0.038% carbon dioxide air is only 0.01% carbon.  Green plants have had to process 1157 pounds of air to make each pound of plant product sugar, starch, cellulose fiber or wood and with air weighing about one ounce per cubic foot the volume is an enormous 18,512 cubic feet.  All of it has to go through tiny pores called "stomata" in the plants; an amazing feat.

In the process plants exude even greater amounts of water in an inefficient exchange process. Every molecule of water vapor is not exchanged for one molecule of CO2.  The ratio, and bargain, are poor at best.  SCAF delivers the same amount of carbon to green plants with 50 pounds of water already in the soil.  Now that water supplies are disappearing the SCAF processes offer a new future to all of agriculture.

Tests show that plants respond immediately to carbon sources in the soil.  In our tests transpiration fell 20% immediately when green plants were watered with CO2 water.  It will improve in time as the plant adjusts to ground sources.

The water saving could approach 96% with genetic engineering.  Where 70% of all water is used for agriculture to feed the nation a 96% reduction in that need would free 67.2% of the total water produced for urban and industrial use trebling our current supply for no more cost than processing!

           No single invention, system or process has been created to produce this much of any substance critical to our economy and well being as will the SCAF processes.  We are truly having a carbon sunrise.